The Bright Path (To Communism)

Recently I saw a lovely 1940 film The Bright Path set in the 1930s. The main character Tanya is an ignorant, hysterical and illiterate peasant who works as a cleaning lady at a provincial hotel. She falls in love with a promising engineer but rejects his romantic advances on her because she’s not his social equal. He’s a university educated professional and she’s a nobody with zero useful skills. That’s of course a Tsarist feudal way of thinking. It was dangerous for a working class girl to get involved with a man far above her social station. And even if the arrangement does somehow work out, it’s more than a little degrading for one person in a marriage to be so dependent on the other. It’s more like charity than love.

Then under communism, Tanya learns to read and becomes a highly successful worker at a weaving factory. At the end of the movie she no longer has any reservations about dating the handsome engineer.

So The Bright Path is an enjoyable movie for everyone that emphasizes the industrialization and liquidation of illiteracy in the Soviet Union. But it is specifically aimed at young girls and women like Tanya. They shouldn’t be afraid to break old gender norms and enter the industrial workforce, and they don’t have to marry out of economic necessity.

I like Soviet films from this period because of their portrayal of working class and peasants. There are characters who are very ignorant and silly, but they’re not portrayed as bad or inferior to educated people like in most western films. And there’s a future for everyone in the new world.

Ian Kummer

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